Ambiguity

During one long stretch of time, story ended with a number of loose ends being tied, often as a build-up to the even more symbolic union of marriage between two characters from differing backgrounds and attitudes.  Thus the comedic ending, the bringing on stage of compromise, peace, accord. all of these perfect endings for sermons or tales with embedded and symbolic morality.

Some readers who may have been neutral developed a thick, questioning hide, suspecting how real life could supply only so few comedic endings in comparison to the more immediate vagueness and uncertainty of ambiguity.  How long would the combatants in a feud remain without squabble?  How long would the good guys continue winning merely because God or Right or Moral Probity were on their side?  And what about, How long can we get away with ignoring the darker sides of the human condition while trying simultaneously to imply that dark side stories produce dark side persons while bright side stories produce god-fearing, respectful sorts?

Such endings became targets for men and women who saw through the propaganda, who refused to drink the metaphorical Kool-aid, that flavored sugar powder to which one added water and ice cubes to accomplish the kind of drink a young person would enjoy.

Except that now, young persons seem to have become another metaphor, the tail, wagging the dog.  For the better part of fifty years, YA literature has been the go-to place for encounters with major moral, social, and emotional boundaries.  YA novels have supplied considerable weight to arguments being expressed by persons of good heart and mind, searching for something beyond mere answers, pushing at boundary and envelope, and tradition, or any other barrier that might get in the way.  The object of the search more often than not has been discovery, perhaps even enlightenment.

For the moralist and fabulists, endings were rigid in their optimism and sense of obligation to some higher power than the presumptuous brain we are most of us equipped from birth onward.  From YA novelists and beyond, we begin to see stories based more on the uncertainty, fragile nature, and vagueness of contemporary life.

Writers producing materials they intend for a yet more sophisticated audience have been notable in their focus on the YA novel, introducing characters and themes representative of a number of contemporary dart boards.  We hear them from time to time as they discuss the growing awareness of YA readers, and we see from them a near unified front relative to a major modern narrative aspect, the thrust of ambiguity.

Ambiguity is uncertainty in action and embedded in the surrounding landscape  as that lack of confident awareness relates to motive.  Ambiguity grasps on to modern story, reflecting the contemporary arguments in all their often complex splendor.  When the arguments appear a bit too staged or managed, readers will be sure to become suspicious, asking for the fairness of ambiguity rather than absolutism.

  These arguments take most of us away from story and plunk us in among the angry, the frustrated, and those trying to claim moral highground by backing a well-lubricated campaign of  religion.

You take sides with those who believe ambiguity is a vital presence because it both allows and then forces the robust reader to make choices, assumptions, and commitments.  You want the reader to own his or her vision of the story being read, and to imagine a deep argument with the author of the work regarding the meanings of the most ambiguous aspects of the story.

The clearer and cleaner the ending, the more dramatic shortcuts the writer has taken.  The more wiggle room for the characters, the more the reader will begin to suspect the author of having hit a buried treasure of potential embarrassment to all sides competing in the story.

If the ending seems too clear, don't trust it.  The moment the ending provokes you to say, "Wait a minute.  What about all that propaganda?" the greater the probability the writer has created a universe with close ties to reality.

Nostalgia

You reach for a box of old photos or a journal on the top shelf of the closet or high up in a cabinet where things are stored.  The object of your search is there and available.  But as as you remove it, something hidden on top of it dislodges, tumbles, catches you on top of the head.

Congratulations.  You've described nostalgia.

Think of nostalgia as a form of homesickness, of affectionate regard for a past time or place, or person, or even many persons.  Trouble is, with the warmth of memory comes the bittersweetness of distance, remove, perhaps even regret, spreading out before you like a cup of coffee spilled on your morning newspaper.

Nostalgia is sentimentality personified, a journey down the memory road to a past you miss while, at the same time, understand is irretrievable.  You cannot recall the last time you've been back to Virginia City, Nevada although there is enough nostalgia to have caused you to dream of being there at least twice this year.  The fact of writing this could even trigger another such dream, where the place is as romantic in setting as you felt it to be when you were a more regular visitor.

You know why you do not return.  Thanks to pictures on its web site, augmenting the inexorable movement of time, you know not to expect anything resembling what it was, nor can you expect to recognize persons whom you know there.  The Virginia Citians you'd see, should you go, would be a new generation, a generation of others.  You'd be another tourist to them.  A deadly chemistry would find its way into conversations.  Rituals would not conjure the same atmosphere much less the results of old times.

Nostalgia is correctly used as a state of being or condition experienced most often by humans.  If you were to humanize it, speak in terms of what it wants, you'd be committing a tort called the pathetic fallacy.  Doing this, you observe how nostalgia wants you focused on the good old days, the rituals you performed or witnessed being performed then, with individuals you were with at the time.

Nostalgia wants to make you yearn for past times, allows you do do so, then yanks the table cloth from under the dishes with a deft, wicked snap, leaving you with a sense of loss, both of a particular time and its accouterments and of the overall passage of time.

The memorable poet, William Carlos Williams, wrote any number of memorable poems, but one in particular results for you because of those three opening lines before the payoff:


so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

So much depends on where and who you were when you first experienced nostalgia.  You were barely into double digits of age and you were homesick for California, filled with nostalgia for it and the places you'd come to know even though you did not at the time understand why the places meant so much to you.  You'd have nightmares in which you were somehow unable to leave Florida.

Your nostalgia was for being outside on the street in Los Angeles, where the season was close to what it is now, and you were with friends, with no clue that you'd soon grow apart from most of them.  Your definition of friend was different than it has become over the years.  The big draw was the way twilight seemed to hang on the evening and conversation, such as it was, flickered like dreams so reaching and exquisite that they were painful to recall.

The nostalgia list has grown in logarithmic progression over the years away from that residential north-south street in the mid-Wilshire District of Los Angeles, although you can still feel that not-yet-dark quality, the smells of jasmine and the crepe paper appearance of the jacaranda trees.  At one point, you squeezed your eyes shut to hear fragments of differing conversations, many of them as filled with inaccuracy as only the conversations of young boys can flaunt accuracy.

These days, your nostalgia is more for friends you've grown apart from in a more basic, primal sense of living and not living.  Your current cat reminds you of a first cat whom, in much innocence, you took to Virginia City twice.  He, in his own innocence, allowed you to do so

You are experiencing some nostalgia for books you read at special ages.  These were books you could not read the same way again.  Those books and the things you wrote shimmer in the nostalgia of evenings in the twilight and advancing darkness.  One constant remains, the uncertainty of what waits for you on up ahead, the ahead of then and the ahead of now.

Time is making a story of you, setting you into a conversation with a past that was looking for a future you have to pry out of your own sense of nostalgia.

Secrets

For as long as you can remember, individuals in your life have approached you with the question, "Can you keep a secret?"

In the early years, you took the mater with serious intent.  After all, it was your word, and you understood on some abstract, nonverbal level how important a matter it was for you to keep your word.

As time passed, you began to see the difficulty in keeping secrets.  Your reasoning that you were not so trustworthy as you'd first thought, explained your distrust of telling secrets to others or listening to theirs.

With additional passage of time, you began to suspect that knowing the secrets about your characters gave you a greater sense of power over them than the simple fact of you having been their creator.  You invented secrets about many of them, wondering how long you could go without revealing the made-up secret about the made-up character.

Secrets are in effect withheld information, facts, opinions, details not meant for public consumption.  Secrets are in greater effect hidden bits of information.  Every secret has a gatekeeper.  The modern secret has the equivalent of the bouncer, the guard behind the braided rope at a cafe or restaurant, meant to keep some out while allowing others inside.

You like the notion of keeping information secret from readers as long as possible, allowing them to discover--along with you--things the characters discover as the story progresses or perhaps have known all along, but see no reason to air them.

The notion of secrets buried within a story intrigues you; although much of your life is an open book, you do have some secrets.  Here is the most intriguing part, the question of whether you are in some manner keeping secrets from yourself.

Because you theorize a self composed of a multitude of separate personality centers, you find it convenient to refer to yourself at appropriate moments as a congress or parliament, on occasion even borrowing the Southerner's "y'all" or the more formal you all.  You try to run a transparent self.

You can bury some of the attitudes and events for which your memories are not fond or wishing to become more prevalent, but because you did these things in the past or did not do them, you try to invite them all to the negotiating table.  There, you offer them a vote or a few moments at the podium to address the rest and perhaps convince us to return to the old ways.  Thus you are not with any conscious deliberation hiding skeletons in the closet.  But nevertheless, the question emerges from time to time:  What secrets are you keeping from yourself?  And if there are any, are you merely withholding them as you do in story, waiting for the most expeditious moment to bring them forth.

Your late pal, Barnaby Conrad, confided many secrets with you, treating you each time as though you were some kind of emotional hidden security box at a bank.  Almost without exception, having sworn yourself to secrecy, you'd discover individuals about whom the secret was composed, speaking openly about it.  After a few of these situations, you invented the secret that you knew each time he swore you to secrecy, you'd find others aware of it within a matter of days.

Sometimes when in conversation with a friend, he or she will catch you smiling, then ask, "What's funny?"

You confess.  "I'm trying to imagine what secrets you might have."

Once, when you did that, the individual said, "I know what you're going to get for a birthday present."

Another time, a friend said, "I'm thinking of dedicating my next book to a cat"

And yet again, a friend said it was her secret that she hated spinach.

Your most significant secret might be the fact of you having friends with strange secrets.

Time and Time Again

When someone tells you to take your time, your first thought is to replay the suggestion for irony or the irony on steroids that is sarcasm.  In similar fashion, when you hear someone advancing the theory that time will tell, your first impression is to wonder what exact thing it is that time will tell.

When you are asked to do something or it is made clear to you that you ought to do some particular thing with all deliberate speed, you cannot help wondering if you will have the time to do it and then, after a brief calculation, the added wonder of what thing you will need to cancel or reschedule or avoid all together in order to do the thing you were asked or importuned to do.

You return to the subject of time with some regularity, not only in regard to your personal schedule and your professional agendas but also relative to time being the common thread in dramatic writing, music, photography, oil, acrylic, and watercolor painting.  There are other places such as dancing, acting, and cooking (as in hours in the over on stove top).

A simple sentence, "Time is running out" can assume any number of interpretations starting with as insignificant a deadline as a discount coupon at a store having a deadline,  Time can be running out on a warranty, a parking meter, the use-by date on a carton of milk and the deadline time for ordering French toast made from brioche dough at Renaud's Patisserie in either the Loreto Plaza or the small mall across State Street from the Arlington Theater.

Time is running out can mean there is a greater statistical probability that your lifespan will not be as  extensive as it was ten years ago, not that you are looking all that dreadful, rather than you are ten years farther down the line of probability.  At such times, there is a good gulp of royalty in the speculation that you could be hit by a bus or truck tomorrow, even though there might be no statistical probability for you to be hit by a truck or bus tomorrow.

Time for a haircut, time to pick up the laundry, time to clean out Goldfarb's litter box, time to get service on your car.  Time to get serious.  No time for fools.  No time for fooling around, a sentiment that brings forth thoughts of time to get serious, no more fooling around, time to get to work.

Works of art do remarkable things with time, freezing segments of it or capturing the essence of time passing quickly or in slow motion.

When the time comes, we'll be ready or we will not be ready.  When the time comes, we'll understand or find out or discover or be sorry or be elated with joy.  If there is no time like the present to do something, there is the moment when the good times are over, the time to pay the piper, and a time to take a stand.

This time you mean business in a way you did not mean business all those times in the past when you were presumably at play or out to lunch.  Of course, this time you mean it, this time counts, this time you won't make the mistakes of the past.  These times may be times that try men's souls, but you have to allow for the potential that such times generally try womens' patience.

In the best of circumstances, you believe it is time you knew because in the worst of circumstances you spend considerable time worrying about the extent of things you do not know and the degree to which you do not know them, thus your suspicions about how dumb you are may well be validated but you are still in the dark about the extent to which your knowledge is attenuated.

Time to go.  Time to reconsider.  Time to get back to work.  Time to grow up.  Time to slow down.  Time to make your sentences shorter.  Time to make your sentences longer.  Time to call it a day.  Time to get back on the horse.  Time to get off your high horse.

Take your time

Destination

How simple to say a destination is the end result of a planned journey.  Destination seems to want to imply an arrival at a place or condition decided upon after some deliberation.

You've had a number of destinations in mind, some relating to relationships with actual persons, others relating to individuals of your creation.  These individuals were not altogether clear in mind, but became more so as your understanding of the story progressed.

Other destinations had to do with career. Some of these destinations were in ways like characters in the making, their relevant details not clear in your mind.  You were as surprised by the ultimate destinations as you often are when discovering things about your invented characters you had not anticipated.

By a certain point in your own story arc, you learned to accept the fact of your often being promoted out of destinations you liked and wanted to retain.  You were elevated, your responsibilities calling for you to keep track of things rather than be the person of whom track was kept.

There were times when your ego got in the way in the sense of urging you to set destinations for your goals that you sensed were inappropriate, having more to do with power and title than function and ability.

Being without a destination causes you to feel disconnected with parts of yourself.  Having too many destinations in play at the same time seems to cause you a sense of resentment, reminding you of the standard complaint of having destinations for which you have no heart.

The proper amount of destination for you is being embarked in a story that has taken you past its point of no return, where you cannot stop because stopping under those circumstances would be like having a persistent itch you cannot reach.  This is an unnerving place but a satisfying one because it forces you deeper into your journey, deeper into complications and possible digressions where you find yourself sometimes awake of a sudden in the early hours of the morning, tingling with unresolved closure.  You're being forced to be curious in a focused way of trying to figure out plausible arrival points, plausible destinations.

You enjoy the beginning, the point of intrigue which is packing for a trip to a destination you cannot yet identify.  You believe work on such a level is true happiness because the journey is about discovering where the destination is, then trying to find ways of reaching that place.  You see yourself as batting about .500 in terms of arrival at places you'd embarked toward without a specific place in mind.  You enjoy thinking yourself to sleep sometimes with a review of the destinations you've set in motion without a completion plan.  How can you have a completion plan when you cannot name the destination?

Why would a person set out on a journey without knowing where he was going?  Why would you have been doing so for a great segment of your younger years and much of your adult life?  Were you a practicing Catholic, you might come to worry that your concerns for journey and destination suggest the stage of limbo or a tap dance along the cusp of the boundaries of Hell.

If you are a practicing anything, the thing you are attempting to practice is writing, which is to say setting forth toward a destination, much in the manner of ancient mariners who steered their crafts beyond the point where they could use the shoreline as a reference point, where you'd have to use some other reference point, say stars, as a guide to get you arrived at your destination.

In some metaphor, you enjoy the boundary line between Hell and un-Hell because it is a reminder that you are once again forcing upon yourself the need to research a way by which you can reach a plausible and appropriate destination.

Earlier this month, you observed within yourself a sense of connection with Sisyphus.  The observation brought you no grief nor concern that you've gone too far this time or that you must repair your attitude or condition.

What you must repair is your education, excising the things you took in in the belief they were true learning as opposed to cultural hype.  This destination, you realize, is not going to be clear cut, meaning you've done it again, set yourself out past the point of no return.

There is some thought that Death is the ultimate destination; once you reach it, you'll not have to be concerned about implications any longer or having bought into cultural lies.  In so many words, screw that.  You are in no hurry to reach that destination.  You would rather risk cultural lies in pursuit of education than experience death.  You would rather trespass on boundary lines between intolerable or culturally unstable conditions such as Hell, pursuing the ongoing uncertainty of being in transit than not.

You may not be planning for death but it would be foolish for you to think death has not been planning for you.  Writers know this and yet they start new projects with purposeful regularity. Writers know they may not finish the journeys on which they've embarked, but so far as you're concerned, the bon voyage parties of setting forth are your true friends and pleasures now.  Many of your dearest ones are in the metaphor of destination, but their memories are fresh with you and you know to pack them along with the things you take on your next venture forth.

The Accidental Man: Superhero or Fiction Writer

 A series of interviews arranged for you by your most recent publisher and your literary agent have sent you scurrying back over past events in your life for answers to questions about how you arrived at now.

In so many ways, your answers remind you of first drafts and of the essays you've composed for this site since 2007, a combination of your "get it all down without thinking" philosophy and your subsequent approach in which you work at something until a surprise revelation or discovery arises--until you're aware of something you hadn't known you knew.

Your middle initial, A. is for Alan, but it could well have been Accident, had you been constructing the character based on you (which you did in fact create but which was also created by a former student of yours who made you into a character who goes about solving mysteries).  Much of your life has had the denominator of accident.  Who and what you are at this moment makes perfect sense because the accidents, by your reckoning began in earnest around the time you were a junior at UCLA, meeting individuals who would cause accidents to happen to you, by which you mean events you'd not planned yourself.

One of the interviews questions observes your tripartite resume of writer, editor, and teacher, the former being what you wished, the latter two coming as complete surprises as a consequence of your efforts to become the former.  You can add that you are by no means content with the status you have achieved as a writer although that does not mean you have no respect for the distances you've achieved, nor indeed that you have lessened your expectations for growth.

Accident is a strong ally in the present result of what you are and how you became such an individual.  If you had not met or said or ventured...  All these if propositions resulted in choices of association from which new opportunities offered themselves.

You'd not thought to enjoy being an editor, much less had you thought to become one until one day an individual whose credentials you questioned was made your superior.  You'd had a few teachers you considered remarkable, but any thoughts you'd had about teaching seemed to have vanished when you attended a class in the education department with a young lady friend.

Now, by accident, you are to some degree all these.  As you answer questions about them, you recall incidents reminding you variously how short a temper you brought to the equation of you, how short in relative terms the fuse of your patience.  At the same time, your memories take you to comparison points with individuals you admired, how you used them as role models because they seemed to have the patience and empathy you lacked.

Your saving grace in this tumultuous world of accident and chance resided in your recognition of the differences between them and you, your envy of their patience and empathy, and your subsequent decision to try your hand at these seeming foreign things.

You must ask yourself if you consider yourself to be a reliable narrator.  Have you in fact grown from what you recognize as your naivete to a semblance of reliability?

Do you in fact tell yourself the truth?  Did you become a writer in order to make a pinata of the truth, seeing the moulds of story as a substitute for your best vision of what happened in actuality?  You've met one or two persons in whom truth seems subordinate to the need for momentary inventiveness.  These persons fascinated you; the memory of them continues to offer interest and attraction.

You are the new super hero, Accidental Man, forged by the street vendor offerings of excitement, luck, and the capricious nature of Reality as it flashes past you, on its way.

There is a wide Sargasso Sea of difference between the person you'd set out to be and the individual you've become, and yet each version is visible to the other and to the you who is able to detach, step back a few feet, and compare with some measure of objectivity.

You've heard some individuals and situations referred to as an accident, waiting to happen.  For your own part in the drama, you are a series of accidents that took place, busily looking for the sources of newer accidents yet, eager to set them in motion to gain the experiences of those happenings.

The no-risk risk

When you find yourself wondering why putting characters at risk in story is vital in the first place, then accelerating the risk is even more important, you often end up with the same answer.  Because you are at risk much of the time.

From the get-go, you're at risk of not liking the work, of needing who knows how many more drafts to get the matter to the point where you do like it.

You are at risk that the process will start afresh with the next scene.  Your risk accelerates when you realize your subsequent drafts here might cause the need for significant revisions there.

You run the risk of your characters getting along, which is several steps worse than their not generating much in the way of chemistry.

Talk about accelerating worseness, you run the risk of discovering you are not as nuanced and evocative as you thought.  This risk can have you paralyzed for days, diagramming scenes in which you attempt to bring forth plausible and entertaining philosophical visions.  Nevertheless.  Worse things can happen.  You may have arrived at a splendid range of narrative, so evocative and plangent that you allow yourself to believe you can replicate this feat again.  To prove your great crescendo of confidence, you attempt another large venture, some narrative bravado, which upon rereading exacts its revenge upon you by requiring more than your customary number of revisions.

You've come to believe there is some golden ratio between the number of times you have to rework or revise something and the point in revision where you see some connection between two or more things you hadn't realized before.  This sounds mystical and metaphysical but is, you believe, only an exercising of the link between the conscious part of your process and the submerged, the so-called unconscious or perhaps intuitive.  There has been an agreeable number of connections, equivalents of your conscious and unconscious mechanisms working together.  Each time you set forth on a project, you know the arrival of a connection or a discovery are the signals you await to let you know the project is nearly done, on the cusp of being ready for submission.

Each time you set forth, the risk appears before you, taunting you:  You will revise hundreds of times, it seems to be telling you, and perhaps you will be reworking and looking for new approaches, and these will not come.  In realistic terms, the risk is asserting itself against your counterdefense of the matter being muscle memory.  You may, you rationalize, have already made the discovery and moved beyond it.  There is risk in believing that, risk in taking things for granted where your craft is concerned.

There is a risk that you will one day make the connection between your need to rework or revise things until you discover something and the labors of King Sisyphus, doomed to push a rock to the top of a steep hill, whereupon it will accrue the downward inertia sufficient to bring it down the hill and at a rest on some relatively flat surface.

There is a risk that you, having attained this insight, will consider the connection as an invitation to share Sisyphus's doom.

There is a risk that you will as a result grow self-piteous, a condition you achieve from time to time at the great expense of watching your writing become anything other than play and fun.

There is a risk that you will stop advising your students and yourself to stop thinking before going after a first draft, and an equal risk that you will not take the time to listen to the material, hopeful of finding out what it wants from you and how you are to set about it.